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Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#31

Post by microtonal »

traceroute66 wrote: post #21
microtonal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the necessity of forced cooling is still there The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. I used an M1 Air for a while (switched to M1 Pro) and it would only throttle slightly during very long builds. There have also been many tests where the MacBook Pro M1 (which does have a fan), the fan only spins up after minutes of loading all cores. The MacBook Air M1 shows that it is possible to have a fast [1], passively cooled…

> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. Thanks for the correction My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC.

And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#33

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

microtonal wrote: post #29
CiaranMcNulty wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could count the number of times my M1 (13") MBP's fans have kicked in over the last year on two hands, and in most cases when I investigate there's some rogue process running thrashing some of the cores (looking at you, Fusion360)

My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up. I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes…

>or >= 16GB RAM

My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#34

Post by AnthonBerg »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #28

In addition to what everyone else have already said: having a fan is hardly a disadvantage for most of customers. So the demand isn't high.

I would put it like this: Few customers have an intuition for the disadvantages of having a fan. Or the advantages of a fan-free laptop.

A fan is a big and fragile physical component with a lot of associated cost – physical size, constraints on heatsink dimensions, noise, and power.

And indeed, customers' response to Apple's fanless laptops has shown a reasonably strong economic preference for them, or it seems that way right?

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#36

Post by skrebbel »

Intel used to have a CPU line called the "Core m" which allowed fanless use. I had Lenovo laptop with one and i loved it. But they were hard to find then already, and i think they discontinued the line. My theory is that reviewers and benchmarkers don't care enough about "fanless" and gave them bad reviews ("slow for the price") while not highlighting the major advantage that being fanless is.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#37

Post by theropost »

skrebbel wrote: post #36

Intel used to have a CPU line called the "Core m" which allowed fanless use. I had Lenovo laptop with one and i loved it. But they were hard to find then already, and i think they discontinued the line. My theory is that reviewers and benchmarkers don't care enough about "fanless" and gave them bad reviews ("slow for the price") while not highlighting the major advantage that being fanless is.

I have a Chromebook with a m3-8100y, and it is pretty good for general surfing and video. Not the fastest chip, but does the trick. I find it a big slower in RDP, but otherwise no complaints.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#38

Post by daviddever23box »

microtonal wrote: post #31
traceroute66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. Thanks for the correction My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

This - bought an Amber Lake-Y Core-i5 based MacBook Air (True Tone. 2019 - A1932) and returned it, as the fan noise was frequent and ridiculous. (I've heard that the Ice Lake-based sucessor was worse.)

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#39

Post by jotm »

I don't think people care enough about fanless laptops, of which there are a few. And companies seem to really love penny pinching when it comes to the heatsink, which would have to be way bigger and/or better designed - that's almost out of the realm of known physics when it comes to HP, Dell and Lenovo :D

You could go "fanless" on many laptops, though. You'll have to check beforehand, but all you need is TDP adjustment (and ideally, undervolting) support and the ability to turn off the fan or adjust the speed table with something like NotebookFanControl.

For TDP/TPL/voltage adjustments, use Throttlestop on Windows; Linux also has some tools or you can write to MSRs directly after a long night of figuring them out. AMD mobile chips can not be undervolted as of right now, btw, a real shame. But neither can Intel with Plundervolt mitigations, so that's a double real shame.

A Core i7 can go up to ~20W without turning the fan on, and higher with the fan at minimum (I doubt you'll hear it). The critical temperature (=fan at full speed, overriding settings) is usually over 80 degrees Celsius, which is high enough that it may never get there.

Using better thermal paste would be highly desirable, too.

The major disadvantage is obviously performance - you'd get half of whatever the chip offers, at best.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#40

Post by threeseed »

langsoul-com wrote: post #23

M1 is arm, whilst Intel and amd aren't. Perhaps there'll be general laptops with arm chips that won't have fans.

There is nothing inherently special about ARM that makes it use less power.

Apple simply invested a huge amount of resources and had the benefit of optimising the SOC specifically for the OS.

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